Music Research: Periodical Indexes

Articles from periodicals (journals and magazines) are an essential component of virtually any research undertaking. They can present the very latest findings (or controversies) in the field and are often a deep-dive into a narrow aspect of a topic. Periodical articles can be scholarly essays, but they can also be interviews, bibliographies, letters, or reviews. Refereed (or peer-reviewed) journals are especially valued in scholarly life, as their articles were scrutinized before publication by an editor and subject experts.

Periodical indexes are a great help in finding articles. Searches will yield results in the form of citations. (Citations typically include the author and title of the article, title of the journal, volume, issue number, and page range.) An abstract summarizing the contents of the article might also be included. Ideally—and increasingly commonly—the index provides you with a link by which you can access the full text of the article directly.

Music Periodicals Database and RILM Abstracts of Music Literature (see the next section) are the two major music periodical indexes we subscribe to. While their contents overlap to some extent, a thorough researcher should consult both databases. If you're working on an interdisciplinary topic (such as "music and religious experience" or "effects of prenatal music exposure"), you should consider searching additional indexes such as Humanities Source or ERIC, just to name two. See a selected list of these databases below.

Searching for articles used to be a complicated affair, but it's getting easier with evolving technology. Our own online "discovery tool," Start Your Research, is a highly powerful search engine. Searches will yield results from virtually all our periodical databases (including RILM and Music Periodicals Database), alongside the usual catalog listings for our books/ebooks, recordings, digital collections, etc. It can't be guaranteed to bring up absolutely every article citation that would be useful to your research or literature review, so if you are doing a post-graduate research project, we still encourage you to search individual databases. But, just doing one "megasearch" in Start Your Research can take you impressively far.

If you wish to search for a journal title directly (e.g. The Musical Quarterly), a search in Periodical List will show you which issues we have access to, whether by print or full-text online. (Go to Start Your Research and click the "Periodicals" button.) And if you discover that we do not have full-text access to a particular article you need, you can submit a request to our Interlibrary Loan department, who will attempt to borrow a copy or request an article/chapter scan from another library on your behalf.